


Mad Gods

by StrangerInAStrangeWorld



Category: Bleach
Genre: Borderline Torture, But not the 'fun' kind, Drugs, Gen, Human Experimentation, everyone's on the brink of insanity
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-06-04
Updated: 2015-06-01
Packaged: 2018-04-02 09:42:12
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,511
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4055326
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/StrangerInAStrangeWorld/pseuds/StrangerInAStrangeWorld
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>AU. When Yoruichi came for the Visoreds, she found only dried blood and shattered masks. The Goddess of Flash vanished and took only Urahara and Tessai with her.</p><p>Fitting, that rogue gods should flee heaven and their demon-crazed victims be locked beneath the earth.</p><p>That was some time ago. The Visoreds can't tell how long. The Shinigami don't care. What used to matter was curing them, and with that hope dead, their lives have become waking nightmares interspersed with Kurotsuchi's experimentation and killing enemies Seireitei doesn't want to waste Shinigami on.</p><p>What matters now is making sure they survive another day. But Seireitei tires of its rabid dogs more and more each day. Can the Visoreds break their chains? Do they want to?</p>
            </blockquote>





	Mad Gods

"And what is your name again?"

His voice is oily, oozing from black-painted lips to her ears. The woman watches his deathly pale face from beneath tangles of unbound black hair and wonders why his white is deemed acceptable and hers is not.

She knows why. As long as he has her and the others (what others? She sees no one but the guards and him these days; she is alone) to vivisect and drug and stitch up again, he won't hurt anyone innocent. If some poor soul untied the woman from her chair, she'd be on them in seconds.

No. She can't think about that. If she thinks about how much she wants (needs) to hurt (tear, crush, devour) people, the thing inside her will tear free from its prison in her body. Even if it didn't burn and freeze and suffocate her, Kurotsuchi only responds one way to that. And the drugs he fills her veins with are almost as bad as when the white comes.

"Shiroko," she answers him at last, voice tinny from the metal half-mask. Damn redundant restraint. Damn scientist bastard. The only good part of Kurotsuchi's arrogance is that he assumes it's all she can do to form coherent sentences. Asshole. (Some days he's right, but today's a good day.)

What she wouldn't give for it to really be a good day.

"No!" He screams, shoving his face up to hers. Acidic power flares and is quenched in a second. Even Kurotsuchi has to follow rules. Use reiatsu around the woman and it might bring the white, so there's none of that. The woman with cloth-wrapped hair said so. "That is  _not_ your name! You will accept whatever I in my generosity have decided to call you." All at once his anger fades and he pulls away. The woman gets a charming view of large yellow teeth as he sneers at her. "A beast doesn't even need a name. You should be grateful. Now, what's your name?"

"Puta," she says. It must mean something rude or he wouldn't bray with laughter every time she says it. Asshole. Puta isn't her name. She doesn't know what it is, doesn't remember. It's hidden behind an iron wall that reeks of cheap liquor and flowers and she won't remember (she can't remember), she can't lose control-

Her name. The name she's given herself today.  _Focus on that,_ she tells herself.  _It's from here. It'll protect you. It can't have you if you stay here._   _You're-_

Kurotsuchi sniffs. "Finally, you stupid whore. Let's test how your condition- ugh, you again." He directs this last towards someone behind-

 _-Tonbo._ That's her name today. Maybe she'll keep it until the drugs bury it under a haze of pain and delirium. It's comforting somehow, as though the gauzy wings she can half-see are some kind of armor. But they aren't. The armor is bad; it's the form the white under her skin takes when she loses control. And sometimes when she doesn't. Fuck, it itches like there's fire ants in her veins when the armor forms there, but that never lasts long. All she has to do when that happens is breathe and focus on one thing that isn't behind the wall or the madness scraping her brain raw. She tried blanking her mind, but that leaves a void for the white to come in.

Tonbo can't let that happen. She doesn't know why she can't, but there're reasons, most locked behind the wall. One of the ones she lets herself know is that there are reasons at all. There are always reasons for things. So there has to be a reason they're doing this to her. And she has to know why.

That's the big question behind all this. Why? Why is she here? Why won't they tell her what her 'condition' is? Why does Kurotsuchi get to tie her to a chair that's draining her life away and only let her out when he wants a lab rat?

The guard comes up beside her and Tonbo abandons that train of thought. It's not important next to food. Meals are twice—a day? a year? there are periods of dimmed and bright light but time is nothing when you're passed out half the time and barely able to string words together the rest. So when there's food she has to eat. There's never enough nevernevernever and she's so hungry, always so hungry-

"Choose, you dolt!" Kurotsuchi snaps. "I don't have all day to waste stultifying myself with your presence."

It's the same choice she's made the past who-knows-how-many times. Ages or seconds ago they used to switch up which quality of food was on which colored tray but now it's always the same. The food that smells like it's been rotting for days is on the black tray. The food that smells so agonizingly good that the restraints are biting into Tonbo's naked form from how hard she's straining to get to it is on the white tray.

"White," she says, swallowing back drool. She's so hungry, so damn hungry. Can't they get on with it?

So two more guards appear at her elbow, each with a key. Each key clicks into the half-mask, unlocks it. The panel falls down. Saves them from getting near teeth slick with saliva that comes faster and faster the closer their tender (nonono they're  _human_ ) fingers get.

Then they pull away and the third guard selects with shaking fingers a food-cube. Tonbo used to think they were tofu, but the texture's all wrong. And tofu doesn't (she doesn't know how she knows this) have tiny, hard white chips in it and the occasional hair. Figures they'd be that lazy. Rest of this place is shit. Makes sense that even the good food—and she probably only thinks that because there's never enough, period—would be made in a shitty-ass kitchen. Kurotsuchi mutters something about redundant data.

By the time the guards have retreated and Tonbo's managed to devour her rations without taking a finger or two with them, Kurotsuchi's forgetting the rule about reiatsu in his impatience.  _Bad boy,_ she thinks, licking her lips and tasting the coppery tang of the re-locked mask.  _Can't have a troublemaker guarding a- whatever I am._ Who _ever I am._

"Finally! If that Sui-Feng thinks she can restrict my research with intrusions for something as trivial as  _food_ " -he scoffs, turning to the tray his frame, padded with layers of cloth, had obscured- "she's even stupider than the rest of them. Now, let's begin today's treatment." _  
_

As he selects a syringe from the tray and steps fearlessly close, Tonbo jerks away. The needle misses her shoulder by the millimeters the bindings allow her to move.

Kurotsuchi tsks, wrapping a frigid hand around her bicep. Some part of Tonbo notes behind the wall of hunger the pit in her stomach's built in front of her mind that that's way easier than it should be for him.

But the treatment. She needs it (doesn't she? she has to get out someday) and if that means withering on a chair she'll do it. Even if it brings the white. There can only be so much white.

So Tonbo lets him brush at her skin with stinging liquid. Watches as he lowers the tip of the needle to her skin, lets her sweat there for a second. She stares at the wall. The wall is everything, a beautiful (hideous) porcelain (bone) white expanse (prison), she tells herself so her muscles relax long enough for him to jab it in. He makes no pretense of trying to make it hurt less, jams his finger on the end of the syringe so the fluid within squirts into her.

He pulls back and they stare at each other for a few long minutes. He can't hide his white behind hair like she can. Idiot. There's no hiding it. Everyone already knows (and she doesn't know how they know or what they know.)

"I hate you," she pants as her stomach sours and her body starts to seize and burn.

Kurotsuchi sneers, large yellow teeth the only color in her vision. Everything else is white even as black smears her vision like intangible tar.

"I'll be happy to tell the Gotei that you prefer your condition to humanity" he purrs. "The longer you struggle, the longer I can conduct my research. They'll-"

Tonbo doesn't hear what they'll do. She's too busy screaming as the white explodes from her eyes and mouth and it burns it burns it  _burns-_

When she awakens hours (weeks, months, eons) later, the heels of her hands and feet are bruised and bloody. Red smears the armrests of the chair and the floor. The white is gone and she sees no black.

As the grey fog of exhaustion pulls her back, Tonbo uses what willpower she can spare to keep her chin up. She will never bow to this place, to this 'condition.' Even if it kills her.

_ Especially  _ if it kills her.   



End file.
